Chicago theater company uses Natasha McShane’s brutal attack to highlight violence in the city

A new theatrical production in Chicago has taken inspiration from the brutal attack on Irish student Natasha McShane.

"Crime Scene: A Chicago Anthology" addresses the city’s long history of violent crime and what can be done to stop it.

Bucktown-Wicker Park Patch reports that the show explores the story of three true crimes, including the attack of Irish student Natasha McShane, an Irish exchange student who was the victim of a vicious assault in the early hours of the morning in April 2010.

McShane and her friend Stacy Starl Jurich were attacked by Heriberto Viramontes and his girlfriend Marcy Cruz while walking home after a night out in the Wicker Park-Bucktown area.

The show’s creator and director Anthony Moseley says his inspiration was public apathy to the city’s ongoing violence.

“We are losing more people to murder in Chicago than they have been in Iraq and Afghanistan," Moseley said. "And yet we, as a people, I feel, have more empathy and concern for the soldiers that are fighting in our honor than our children that are right here in our streets. So I really wanted to create a piece of art that would hopefully shake up and break up these perceptions that we've kind of fallen into and kind of maybe take the blinders off.”

The script for the docu-drama is based on hundreds of interviews with Chicagoans, ranging from crime victims and their families to police officers and prosecutors.